Church Brew Works

A Pittsburgh Catholic church turned brewpub, with a pale young woman drifting through the dining room and a kitchen no cook wants to close alone.

An accountant at Church Brew Works looked up from a spreadsheet and watched an empty chair slide across the floor of the old rectory office. No one else was in the room. That's a story Sean Casey, the owner, has told multiple local interviewers, and it's the mildest thing the staff have reported since the brewpub opened in a deconsecrated Catholic church on Liberty Avenue.

The building started as St. John the Baptist, whose cornerstone was laid on June 1, 1902, to serve the Irish and Scottish Catholic families pouring into Lawrenceville. The church took a beating almost immediately. A fire in 1915 gutted much of the original interior. The 1936 St. Patrick's Day flood put most of Lawrenceville under water, and St. John's opened its doors to families who had lost everything. People slept in the pews for days.

The Diocese of Pittsburgh closed St. John's in August 1993 after attendance collapsed. Casey bought the deconsecrated building in 1994, kept the stained glass, kept the confessionals, kept most of the Stations of the Cross, and dropped a 150-barrel brew system directly onto the altar platform. The Church Brew Works opened in 1996 as one of Pittsburgh's first brewpubs, and for this the Vatican issued a formal letter of disapproval that Casey has framed on a wall.

The most frequently described ghost is a young woman, pale enough that witnesses notice it before anything else, apparently between 16 and 22. Staff call her the Lady in White. The accounts converge on the same detail, which is that she looks lost, not angry. Nobody has a name for her. The working theory among employees is that she was one of the 1936 flood refugees who took shelter in the church and died there or nearby, though no one has matched a body to the story.

The kitchen is the worst spot. A cook who's worked there since the early 2000s has told coworkers and at least one local reporter that he feels followed every night he closes, physically followed, as in he can tell which side of his body the presence is on. He's never seen anything. He just knows. Cooks on other shifts have said the same thing independently, which is why the kitchen now almost always has two people in it after close even when the prep doesn't need two.

Other reports come from the former church school attached to the brewery, which has large sections that aren't used and sections that can't be used because the floors are going. Staff hear organ music in the main dining room when the church organ, preserved but not functional, is sitting silent. They hear voices coming from the choir loft. Footsteps on the stone floor of the apse when nobody's walked through. A server once carried three beers up to the altar platform, turned around to hand them off, and found nothing behind her for ten feet.

Ghost Hunters filmed at Church Brew Works in the summer of 2021. The episode aired on discovery+ in January 2022. The team picked up EVPs in the school wing and captured some unexplained movement in the kitchen, which lined up with what the staff had been telling them for years. Casey has said in interviews that he doesn't actively promote the haunting because he doesn't want the restaurant to become a sideshow, but he also doesn't pretend the building is normal. It isn't. It's a 120-year-old Gothic church with fermenters in the transept, a pale woman who drifts through the dining room, and a kitchen that won't let the last cook leave alone.

The pierogies are also excellent.